Windows Server Hyper-V Coming to OpenNebula

Microsoft is collaborating with team members of the OpenNebula project to add Windows Server Hyper-V support.

The collaboration, announced on Tuesday, represents another example of Microsoft's outreach to open source communities and projects. In this case, the OpenNebula project focuses on maintaining open source code for a management toolkit used to support private, public and hybrid cloud datacenters in infrastructure-as-a-service deployments. The OpenNebula management toolkit is used by education, government, telecom and hosting entities, among others (see this list). It's released under an Apache open source license.

OpenNebula is mostly used in research projects, but it is also being used by "thousands of organizations" to support large-scale clouds, according to an OpenNebula blog post. Various hypervisors are supported by OpenNebula, including VMware's hypervisors, Citrix's Xen hypervisor and Kernel-Based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisors used with Linux-based servers. Microsoft explained in an announcement that "Windows Server Hyper-V is now an officially supported hypervisor for OpenNebula."

A prototype build integrating Windows Server Hyper-V with OpenNebula is planned for mid-October. The integration will support Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

OpenNebula provides a number of tools for cloud management. It enables the management of security for end users. Group management and multitenancy support are enabled. Provisioning, virtual infrastructure monitoring, virtual machine configuration and physical infrastructure monitoring are just a few of the many features. Funding for OpenNebula comes from Spanish and European Union grant organizations, C12G Labs and Microsoft, as described at OpenNebula's sponsor page.

Microsoft has increasingly stepped up its open source outreach efforts of late. It has a whole team devoted to such interactions, led by Gianugo Rabellino, Microsoft's senior director of open source communities. The outreach especially focuses on ensuring interoperability in heterogeneous computing environments, which might mix Windows and Linux, even though Microsoft continues to compete against Linux vendors and even sue them for alleged intellectual property violations.

Microsoft's outreach to open source Linux was highlighted by Sandy Gupta, general manager of the Microsoft Open Source Group, in Microsoft's OpenNebula announcement.

"Given the highly heterogeneous environments in today's data centers and clouds, we are seeing enablement of various Linux distributions including SUSE, CentOS, Red Hat, and CS2C on Windows Server Hyper-V, as well as emerging open source cloud projects like OpenStack -- and now OpenNebula," Gupta stated in the announcement.